[170.22] WISE and Dark Energy

E. L. Wright (UCLA), P. R. M. Eisenhardt (JPL)

The Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a MIDEX
currently scheduled for launch in 2009 which will survey the
entire sky in 4 mid-infrared bands from 3 to 25 microns with
vastly greater sensitivity than previous all-sky surveys at
these wavelengths. Such a survey will be useful for a large
number of scientific studies and this poster will discuss
one of them: using the late integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect to
provide an independent measurement of the dark energy that
is driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

The WISE short wavelength channels will be very powerful for
detecting the light from old stars in normal galaxies, and
WISE should extend the 2MASS survey of galaxies out to a
redshift of 1. This depth is beyond the peak in the change
of the gravitational potential that produces the correlation
between large scale structure maps the CMB temperature maps.
We will show the sensitivity of this correlation to the dark
matter density, the dark energy density, and the equation of
state of the dark energy.